Archive for January, 2014

MaaS360 is a multi-tenant SaaS based Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution. It not only manages mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows etc) but also your traditional Windows and Apple Macs (OS X) too. To provide visibility of a companies internal resources such as Active Directory, Exchange, Domino or Blackberry in a secure manner to MaaS360, Fiberlink created the “Cloud Extender” (CE). The Cloud Extender is a small Windows application that you can install on an internal Windows server (physical or virtual machine) as shown in the following diagram:

This article details how I setup the Cloud Extender in our lab running on Softlayer, which consists of Active Directory (x2) and Exchange 2010 server (I tested with the Exchange 2007 Exchange Management Tool and PowerShell options below).

Setting up the Cloud Extender on your internal server

The setup guide and Cloud Extender Configuration Tool executable is available from the Setup MaaS360 console as shown

On your nominated intranet server, run the MaaS360_Cloud_Extender.exe and follow the defaults until it is installed.

Run the Cloud Extender Configuration Tool and select if it’s communicating to the Internet directly or via a proxy. The CE needs communication to *.fiberlink.com and *.maas360.com on ports 80 and 443:

The Cloud Extender Configuration Tool runs a series of prerequisite checks:

I next configured the Service account to communicate to Active Directory and Exchange. I then tested Authentication:

I didn’t apply any device managmeent restrictions as shown below:

The Cloud Extender then completes it’s configuration and it automatically downloads any required components from MaaS360:

The Cloud Extender has an Automatic Software Update feature which is nice. Finally click Finish.

Cloud Extender from the MaaS360 console

Now login to the MaaS360.com console and select Setup and Cloud Extender. You can see the range of services configured and last communication times.

You can then run a series of tests to ensure the Extender running correctly.

So that’s it! Incredibly easy and I took less than 30 minutes to walk myself through the installation and configuration. If you have any questions, the MaaS360 MDM forum looks a great place look first. Of course, if you would like to try out MaaS360, you can register for a free 30-day trial by going to www.maas360.com/IBM.